A Test of Courage

Anne Dillard said "You can't test courage cautiously," but Institute scientists have found a way to test it fairly safely, at least.

One might think of courage as an abstract idea, but it turns out that acts of bravery reveal a unique activity pattern in the brain. An experiment at the Institute to identify the brain mechanisms that take control when the call to action conquers fear involved a live snake on a remote-controlled trolley and volunteers with a fear of snakes in an fMRI.

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For everyone interested in how their brain works, I'd suggest checking out a book coming out soon called Picturing Personhood, by MIT anthropologist Joseph Dumit. Dumit shows how easy it is for brain scans to become cultural Rorschach tests. Scans of mental activity, such as fMRI or PET, are…

Our brains are shaping our decisions long before we become consciously aware of them. That's the conclusion of a remarkable new study which shows that patterns of activity in certain parts of our brain can predict the outcome of a decision seconds before we're even aware that we're making one.
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We are being constantly bombarded with news stories containing pretty pictures of the brain, with headings such as "Brain's adventure centre located". Journalists now seem to refer routinely to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as "mind reading", and exaggerated claims about its powers…

I do not know anything about the subject, but if the relevant areas in the brain can be identified, would it not be possible to stimulate them with a weak electric current to help patients overcome -for instance- a socially handicapping phobia?
And once the neurons involved in "courage" get stimulated, will not the neurons progressively get more effective, just like the neurons involved in other often repeated tasks?

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